People Who've Known Someone That Went Missing Share Their Story

People Who've Known Someone That Went Missing Share Their Story

Missing people are an extremely scary part of our reality that unfortunately happen on a daily basis. People go missing for a few reasons: Of their own free will (which is unfortunately uncommon), because someone has forced them to, or because a situation has taken them out of the running.


Sometimes, the only people remaining to tell those peoples' stories are the folks that knew them best. Wives, husbands, friends, partners; and sometimes those people are responsible for the missing people.

But don't you want to know what happened to someone once you hear they've gone missing?

Redditor whatitdowhatitbee asked:

"Have you ever known someone who's gone missing? If so, what's the story?"

Here were some of those answers.

A Desperate Move

"A woman who was friends with my grandmother. She disappeared for 4 years. Until her husband died in an accident."

"The man was extremely violent, and it was a time when abuse was not taken seriously. Marital rape wasn't even a thing in the law."

"So, not seeing any solution, the woman left, and only came back when the news that her husband died reached her."-Marawal

Bloody Murder

"My neighbor's wife disappeared one day. Then they found out the husband cooked her in their restaurant for 3 days. He drained the liquids into the grease trap and threw the bones into the garbage."

"Never found those. But he kept her skull for his moms attic."

"He got a new girlfriend within weeks of his wife's disappearance, and when he noticed the cops following him on a drive with his girlfriend, he confessed everything to her, stopped the car and jumped off a huge cliff, and lived."

"When they asked him why he killed her he just said 'she was too loud.'"-dillydallyally97

Military Grade Rules

"Had a friend in high school who had seriously strict parents. He really wasn't a bad kid AT ALL, just doing the normal stuff we all were doing, but his parents decided he needed to go to some kind of military boarding school."

"We wrote to each other but it kind of trickled off as a couple of years went by."

"He came back to our town and we hung out a little but then he was gone and no one ever heard of him again, including his family. I still think of him to this day. (This was the mid-late 70's)"-Luv2Burn

People really do not just go missing for no reason, either.

Internet Romance

"A girl that transferred into our high school around 10th grade just up and disappeared one weekend without any real trace. Many weeks later, it turned out she had left town to meet a guy she met on AOL (see kids, AOL used to be cool...)."

"Classic story, he was much much older, she was underage, they actually stayed together and the girl's family ended up coming around to accepting it. Really weird."

"What made it even weirder for me is that I was not friends with this girl, but she lived in my neighborhood. YEARS later, my mom had become friends with the girl's mom."

"My mom found out that the girl told her parents for months that she was on the phone or IMing me anytime she was talking to the older man!"

"Her parents eventually realized she and I were never communicating, but since we were the same age, I was unknowingly her cover story for months."

"To this day, I've still never had an actual conversation with this girl. Really weird finding out that I had been her fake boyfriend all those years prior."-justduett

The Awful Things The Pandemic Put Us Back Into

"This just happened recently. A friend of mine when we were teenagers struggled with addiction but overcame it and moved across the country and was working as an outreach worker and helping others overcome addiction and homelessness."

"I guess covid made her spiral back into addiction and she went missing and they ended up finding her body in a ravine and they think it was human trafficking related. it's now being treated as a homicide."-specter-magic

A Detriment To His Poor Family

"When I was a teenager, there was a kid that lived a few doors down from me that was always hanging around my driveway. He didn't have very many friends, came from a broken home, and had some behavioral issues."

"Clearly in need of companionship, I would invite him on bike rides around our neighborhood and play video games with him."

"He always used to tell me that if he ever chose to disappear, no one would be able to find him. Years later, when he was around 25, he made good on that promise."

"His mother is one of the kindest people I have ever met, and it's been about 7 years and she is still fervently looking for him. It is crushing."-ph0replay

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The Mystery Is Too Deep

"A fella I went to middle & high school with went missing around Thanksgiving one year. It was about 10 years ago now. Mid size town in KY."

"There were a lot of Facebook posts, pleas from his dad, community organized searches, etc. He was a new father himself, and it made for a terribly sad story around the holidays."

"If I remember right, his truck was found burned out, hidden in the woods. Then his body was found separately, also burned, but with a gunshot to the head. I don't believe anyone has been charged, or at least I haven't heard of such."-Camdidex

And the people that cause people to go missing are the worst kinds of people in the universe.

Abandonment Issues

"About 15 years ago, my uncle drove up from Arizona with his 3 kids to Illinois where my family and Grandma lived. He stayed the weekend at my Grandmas, and was supposed to stay another week before heading back to Arizona, but then left in the middle of the night on a Sunday without a word."

"He did, however, leave a note saying he wouldn't be back and my Grandma was to take care of the kids."

"None of us, not even his kids or ex-wife, heard or saw anything about him until 2 years ago when my mom found him on Facebook. Apparently he moved to the Philippines with some Filipino woman and started a new family there."-AmBull1216

Deadbeats Galore

"My grandfather. He was a deadbeat dad, drinking all his money and making my mother and grandma suffer a lot. He was violent and used to cheat on my grandma with several women."

"One day he didn't come after work to the house for about 15 years. Turns out he had won a lottery prize during the 70's and moved to Brazil without telling anybody."

"My grandma only got a letter a year later saying that she should meet him in Brazil but my grandma ignored him and married the man she spent her whole life with."

"Funny enough, he came back during the 90's completely broke and with a debt with some Brazilian mafia dudes. My mom told him to beat it and he threatened us to sell the house unless we welcomed him back in the family."

"Little did he know that my grandma actually bought back the house from the bank so he spent the rest of his short remaining life as a homeless man."-yumiyacchi

Gone In 60 Seconds

"I had an employee, Jason, that had worked for us for 6 years, 4 of those directly reporting to me. He was a pretty good worker, and a nice guy."

"One day, a police officer came to our office and said he was looking for Jason. Jason was scheduled off. The officer said, Jason has a warrant for an unpaid traffic violation, no big deal."

"He was just wanted to come down to the court building and make arrangements to take care of the legal issue. The next day, we told Jason what had happened."

"He asked me if he could clock out right then and go down and settle it immediately, I said sure. So he went. Later that same day, he came back to work saying it was all taken care of."

"Maybe a month went by, and then another officer showed up looking for Jason. The next time Jason was scheduled I told him another Cop came by."

"He said he had worked out a payment plan for the fine and had forgotten to make the payment. He again asked me if he could leave to take care of it. He left."

"I never saw him again, ever. We called the jails in the area to see if they had him, no. We eventually got in touch with his ex. She said that she was looking for him too and hadn't seen him."

"To this day I don't really know what happened or where he went. Online searches have not turned up anything, he has a pretty common name so it's like a needle in a haystack. It seemed like a simple traffic fine was hardly a reason to abandon a good job, but we may never know."-StanYelnats3


After all those years gone, what do you think happens to people if they survive? Do they come back, Elizabeth Smart style?

Or is a part of them always missing forever?

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